The memo shows the advice Hillary Clinton was getting to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. As Trump seeks to extricate the U.S. the memo has again become relevant, writes Daniel Lazare.
by
Daniel Lazare
Part
3 - How it Turned Out
Needless
to say, that’s not how things turned out. At that moment, Libya
seemed under control. But three or four months later, it would
explode as Western-backed Islamist militias blasted away at one
another, imposing strict Sharia law, re-instituting slavery and
rolling back decades of social progress. Once President Barack Obama
approved a modified version of the Clinton-Petraeus plan, Syria would
plunge into the same abyss as jihadis funded by Saudi Arabia and the
other oil monarchies, many of whom came from Libya, spread sectarian
violence and fear.
The
memo’s assumption that the U.S. could neatly and cleanly decapitate
the Syrian government without having to worry about broader
consequences was little short of deluded.
The
notion that ordinary Syrians would fall to their knees in gratitude
was ludicrous while Clinton’s disregard for the intricacies of
Syrian politics was astonishing.
There is
also the memo’s blithe suggestion that Washington “work with
regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize,
train, and arm Syrian rebel forces.”
In
late 2009, Secretary of State Clinton sent another diplomatic memo
made public by Wikileaks saying that “donors in Saudi Arabia
constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist
groups worldwide.” So what made her think two years later that
the kingdom would not fund Syrian jihadis of precisely the same ilk?
The 2009
memo slammed Qatar for allowing Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other
terrorist groups to use the sheikdom “as a fundraising locale.”
She was well aware then that a pro-Al Qaeda autocracy would now help
Syrians “fight for their freedom,” as the memo she sent
puts it.
There is
a remarkable continuity between the Syria policy that Clinton backed
and earlier policies in Afghanistan and Libya. In the first, U.S.
military aid wound up flowing to the notorious warlord Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a religious sectarian and raging anti-western xenophobe
who nonetheless was “the most efficient at killing Soviets,”
as Steve Coll put it in “Ghost Wars,” his bestselling 2004
account of the CIA’s love affair with jihad.
Hekmatyar’s
cutthroats wound up with the lion’s share of American arms. More or
less the same thing happened in Libya once Clinton persuaded Qatar
to join the anti-Gaddafi coalition. The sheikdom seized the
opportunity to distribute some $400 million to various rebel
militias, many of them extreme Islamist. The Obama administration
said nothing in response.
Once
again, U.S. arms and materiel flowed to the most reactionary
elements. The same would happen in Syria where U.S. and Saudi arms
went to the local Al Qaeda affiliate, known as Jabhat al-Nusra, and
even to ISIS, as a meticulous report by Conflict Armament Research, a
Swiss and EU-funded study group in London, has shown. (See “Did
Obama Arm Islamic State Killers?” Consortium News, Dec. 21, 2017.)
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